Practices with Promise Success Story

Data Dashboard: Student Transition and Success

Consortium:
Foothill De Anza / NSCCSTC

Type of Practice: Data & Accountability

Objective(s):Respond to short-term data reporting needs required by AEBGFoster regional and local system integration efforts pertaining to assessment and intake of adult students.Support data sharing efforts to bolster performance accountability and program evaluation.Leverage statewide efforts to build a federated and aligned workforce and education performance accountability system

Organizations that were involved: All five agencies in our Consortium were part of this work: DeAnza College, Fremont Union High School District Adult School, Foothill College, Mountain View Los Altos Adult School and Palo Alto Adult

The Challenge

One of our Consortium's Work Groups, the Data Integration Work Group, focused on data reporting and accountability, calibrating practices for data collection and submission. In addition, this Work Group partnered with Dr. David Ulate and his researchers in the Foothill-DeAnza District to create an in-house Data Dashboard to support analysis and accountability within the consortium; this was created when no statewide data system was in place to meet the consortium’s need for accessing collective data. Our ongoing challenge, however, is having funding to have a part time researcher to maintain the dashboard as well as analyze and share/educate our consortium membership and track project data generated by the Work Group SMART Goals.

The Solution

By creating this Dashboard, the Consortium is able to upload student data from the three adult schools and merge this with data from the two community colleges. It matches the records for those who have transitioned into our two community colleges. There is much we can discover as we now have access to such things as student grades by quarter, the date given, the class title, withdrawals, and course-taking patterns among many other things. This Dashboard is much more detailed, in "real time" (versus delayed by one year) and easily accessible and manipulated. A sub-committee has been working on exploring this more and the concluded this is a strong tool that would meet our numerous data needs not met by the current Launchboard.

Outcomes

The result of working with this Data Dashboard influenced the SMART goals and 2019-2022 Consortium Plan. We can potentially identify which classes have the greatest passing success, what impedes student progress, and tracking cohorts of students to identify what academic skills, attitudes and behaviors lead to success; this will then influence our transition practices at all agencies and our “warm handoff” procedures. In addition, "real time" data would allow for appropriate interventions including how the community colleges can quickly and systemically respond to transitioned AE students needs. In short, we need accurate, "live" and detailed data in order to have impactful interventions since current state resources are in their infancy.

The Data

There is value in thinking about data in lots of ways which includes alignment as well as individual student pathways which may be varied and diverse. There is a real need to see every point in a student's path to identify patterns of success and areas where our systems need improvement. In addition, pathways are non-linear. We need to look at student support if they jump back to the Adult Schools and the reasons for this. In our 2019-2022 three year plan, there is evidence of the use of the Data Dashboard in both the data section and the SMART Goals created by the Work Groups. There is also narrative about the emergence of best practices that have resulted from just creating the Dashboard.